Comp-U-News from Comp-U-Talk

July 2016

I changed my password everywhere to 'incorrect'.
That way when I forget it, it always reminds me, "Your password is
Incorrect". ~Anonymous.

I just read an article concerning
cybercrime and how the criminals are able to keep their networks of
corruption functioning at 100%. I have to say,
they are ingenious. The shortened version goes like
this: 84 percent of compromised computers are
in the Ukraine, 12% in Russia and 3% in Romania. The
remaining 1% are sprinkled around the world. The
compromised computers are hosting websites, collecting stolen payments,
serving malware, gathering personal data. To
avoid being shut down, they have figured out a way to move the websites
from one computer to another every two and a half minutes.
For my math head friends, that’s 24 moves every hour, 576 moves
every day. I’m not certain if it makes me sad or if
it makes me mad. Part of me wishes I had the skill
set to know how to do this, part of me is angry that they are using
incredible brain capacity for such evil. Click
here if you would like to read the article in its entirety.

Also in the news this past month:
Several large sites including Facebook and Netflix may be
requesting changes to your password. Their reasoning
is simple: Users have a tendency to use the same
password at multiple sites. If they think you have
used the same password at a site that was breached, even if the breach
was years ago, they will be requesting a reset. Here
is my suggestion for helping you create unique passwords for each site
and remembering them. Look at your favorite password.
It should be a minimum of 8 characters long.
It should contain at least three of these features:
1. UPPER case characters, 2. lower
case characters, 3. Numb3rs, 4.
Symbol$. Once you have a password that meets these
requirements, then tweak the password to make it unique to each site.

Let’s look at some tweaks.
Let’s pretend your favorite password is P@$$w0rd.
Lets come up with some tweaks for your account at Facebook.
Using the first letter and last letter of Facebook, we can make:
FP@$$w0rdk;
FKP@$$w0rd, P@$$Fkw0rd,
P@$$w0rdFk, or using Facebook’s common
abbreviation of FB we can make FP@$$w0rdB,
FBP@$$w0rd, P@$$FBw0rd,
P@$$w0rdFB. The trick to
remembering all of your passwords is to be consistent.
There are various software utilities that will help you remember
passwords for individual sites. I haven’t been wildly
impressed with them in the past. If I’m bored this
month, I might look at them again and report back. If
someone out there wants to make a recommend, I will consider passing the
info along. The complete story about password resets
can be found here.

And one last time (a repeat from
last month): If you are thinking about upgrading to
Windows 10, now is the time. Microsoft will continue
to offer free upgrades until July 29, after that there will be an
upgrade charge. There are advantages to Windows 10.
It has a faster boot time and Microsoft will be providing patches
until 2025. Microsoft will stop “fixing”
Windows 7 in January, 2020, and will stop “fixing”
Windows 8 in January 2023. That equates to as much as
5 additional years before the computer is considered obsolete.
If you think you might want it, get it now before it is gone!

If you know for certain that you
don’t want Windows 10 then cruise over to
https://www.grc.com/never10.htm, and download and run the Never10
utility. This tool will turn off the nag about
upgrading to Windows 10 and if your system has already downloaded the
6.5 gigs of install files, it will delete those for you as well.
If you change your mind and want Windows 10, simply run the
utility again and it will reverse the action and 10 will be available to
you.

That’s it for this month.
Stay safe this summer.

~Janet

And because it
made me laugh, and I'm tempted to try it - 6 pack abs made easy!